As Expected, Turkey's YouTube Ban Is Back On

from the but-of-course... dept

Can't say this one was a surprise. In discussing the lifting of the ban on YouTube in Turkey earlier this week, we pointed out that officials claimed that "common sense prevailed," but they didn't mean the sort of common sense that many of us thought: they lifted the ban because they thought (incorrectly) that YouTube was willing to censor content on their behalf. But, that's not the case, and the video was only taken down due to a bogus copyright claim.

The video has since been reinstated... and so has the ban. The latest ban, however, is not about that same video, but a different video that a Turkish court found objectionable, which gives even more reasons to suggest that YouTube is going to remain mostly banned in Turkey for a long time. Every time someone finds an "objectionable" video, the entire site gets blocked? Yeah, don't expect to view much YouTube in Turkey.

Re:

Actually post stuff that offends Turkish courts to as many places as possible, then inform the turkish courts of the offending material and location. We could write a bot that does that and give it to the guys at 4Chan. It would be pretty funny and a huge statement.

I'm from Turkey, we, as most of the Turkish citizens, do not want Youtube to be banned, of course. So, do not punish us. We are not happy with the ban. It's just the politicians dirty work, we can do nothing. We change our DNS's to access youtube for a long time. Sometimes, change our hosts file when DNS is not enough.

And youtube has not been banned yet, the court decided to ban, but now Turkish IT will communicate with youtube for the videos to be removed. If not, youtube will be banned again. But this time, I think Youtube will remove these videos, because it is a violation of private life. Because it shows some naughty scenes of one of our political leaders :)